Helen Mirren Thrilled to Find Out She’s Younger Than She Thought

Time’s a fickle trickster. It expands and it contracts. It pretends to be linear while it layers the past over the present and folds in the future. As a vaguely written character once said, “Time is a flat circle.” Now, whatever time is, it’s moving slowly. All the awful stuff happening in the past year has encouraged time to come to a near standstill. It often feels like we’re all in this together (this being the toxic bit of amber we’re fixed inside of). I’m, of course, referring to how Diet Coke is trying to do what La Croix already does just fine. You’re not fooling anyone, Coke! The seltzer revolution already happened! Get over it! Honestly, it’s amazing we all acknowledged another year has gone by. It felt like it would never come.

Some of us have been hit harder than others by the time warp. Helen Mirren, for example. She’s been hit very hard. So hard that every sun that rose in the past year felt like two suns rising. That’s two years for the price of one lousy one! But reality doesn’t trail far behind a lagging year. Because as elastic as time is, it’s also unrelenting. Don’t ask me to explain how or why. We’ve got our top people on it, and they can’t even be certain! But anyway, Thursday on Ellen, host Ellen DeGeneres corrected the actress on her age. Mirren contended she’s 73. DeGeneres contended that she’s 72. Who’s right? Ellen, according to Google!

And Mirren was thrilled. As she said to Ellen:

Are you sure? I’m 72? This is fantastic! I’ve just made a whole year.
Because my husband and I thought we were 74, and then we we worked it
out, and no, we’re 73. So we both went, ‘Oh, fantastic, we’ve got a
whole extra year!’ And now I’ve got another whole year.

This is fantastic news indeed! What a gift. We‘ve all been there as 20 bends toward 30, and 30 to 60. We’ve counted backwards from average lifespans for our particular makeup, and calculated how much time we reasonably have left. What a nice thing to have one more. What is Mirren going to do with hers? Not play the Queen in The Crown, unfortunately. She promised DeGeneres she wasn’t going to do that. Maybe catch up on television. Maybe she’ll donate it to a good cause—use it as an opportunity to ensure time moves along at a comfortable clip in the future, instead of being held back by one horror show or other happening all around us. Everyone, all of us, could use some extra time to do a little more.

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